Sunday, October 10, 2010

60 Minutes gets the "Silent Treatment" from Wall St

Make sure you check out tonight's 60 Minutes piece on high frequency trading tonight.

What is interesting here is how no one on Wall St was willing talk about it. They couldn't even go in and see the building for crying out loud.

I can't help but ask: What is Wall St trying to hide?

As Steve notes below, high frequency trading appears to just another game where Wall St attempts to "master the markets". In other words" "manipulate them.

It appears the only way to make money on the street at these days is by blatantly cheating.  If what was going on was legitimate then they wouldn't be avoiding 60 Minutes like the plague.

I don't know about you but it makes me extremely nervous that there are only 15 people that are basically running "the nerve center" of the markets.

Again a few questions:

Who are these people and what do they have the ability to do when it comes to market making? Where did they used to work before they came to the exchanges? Goldman Sachs? JP Morgan? Band of America?

I will update this tonight if anything newsworthy comes out in this piece.

However, since nobody will talk, I think the chances of getting any solid information as to how this HFT game actually works are slim to none.

I'll say it again:  Why anyone invests their life savings in this shark tank is beyond me.




Update

Here is the 60 Minutes piece in it's entirety.  I suggest you take a peek.  It's very well done and it made me feel even less confident in the stock market.

Enjoy:


3 comments:

Herb said...

Well since that Russian guy uploaded the source code to Goldman Sachs high frequency trading programs to the interweb, 15 people may be a under estimate.

Of course, I have not read anything recently on what happened to him or if he is still alive.

Jeff said...

LOL Herb

I remember that.

Watching the market tonight. Some food Commodity futures are lock limit up.

People are gonna be seriously hurting if this crap continues.

Food prices are going to soar.

Anonymous said...

I watched the episode, although it does seem in a way to be cheating by using these computer programs and they are profiting from small amounts on each security, I don't think the average long term investor would be effected unless there is another "flash crash" or "flash run" scenario. I personally am more disturbed with the manipulation by the government with QE2, bailouts etc. I think these conditions effect the average invesotr more because you cannot make an informed decision when the Fed and Congress put thier fingers in the pie, changing the landscape. The really bad thing is that many of these programs have not had the desired effects as well, so it was just a waste of tax payer dollars.